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Vice President Joe Biden has asked officials tasked with overseeing the stimulus-tracking website Recovery.gov to correct statistics suggesting Recovery Act funds had been sent to nonexistent congressional districts, according to a spokesman.

Biden, whom President Obama asked to perform an oversight role as "sheriff" of the stimulus program, was briefed Tuesday on reports of flawed job-creation numbers.

"He thinks it is a relatively small problem involving a small number of jobs that exist, but which were entered into Recovery.gov with the wrong coding and therefore the wrong address," Biden spokesman Jay Carney said in an email. "He expects the problem will be fixed quickly."

Biden's directive follows an ABC News report highlighting errors on Recovery.gov that erroneously showed hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent – and thousands of jobs had been created or saved – in misnumbered or fictional congressional districts.

It's not the first time the administration has struggled with messy stimulus statistics. Last month, after a wave of fact-checking stories on the White House's job-creation claims, the vice president conceded that the administration's employment numbers sometimes require additional tweaking.

"We know this is not 100 percent accurate," Biden said of the Recovery.gov data, at an event where he announced 1 million jobs had been created or saved by the Recovery Act. "Further updates and corrections are going to be needed."

Edward DeSeve, special adviser on the implementation of the stimulus bill, also addressed this week's reports that jobs had been created or saved in nonexistent congressional districts.

Calling the mistaken statistics "silly" and "frustrating," DeSeve argued in a blog post on the White House website that "transparency is going to be messy," but that it's still "better than the alternative."

"It would be great if every report filed was correct the first time, on time, and contained no errors," DeSeve wrote. "But that's not realistic when 130,000 reports are being filed in a 10 day period."

100 Comments

If they "fix" the numbers on that website, you'll have to admit you taxed, borrowed and spent a trillion dollars to repay your campaign donors and the unions for their support getting you elected. Obama's and your administration hasn't created anything. You've just taken a trillion dollars from people who earned it and given it to your political cronies and any other moochers who happened to be hanging around. That's not the "hope n' change" America expected. Just lie and deny. Worked for Bill Clinton.

Hey Joe, Could you let us know what happened to the money that supposedly went to these ACORN districts? The money would be somewhere, RIGHT? If not to the phoney districts in which REAL districts did it go to. We look soooooooooooo forward to this administrations honesty. LMAO

Excuses, excuses....When will the press do its job and verify the administration's claim of saving or creating 1 million jobs? It is obvious from the reporting that they cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

As the Boston Globe, Associated Press, Sacramento Bee, etc have also reported the bogus jobs that were never "created" or "saved," will these corrections also be made?

Nearly every employer contacted by the various news agencies have agreed that the numbers were overstated and in many cases non-existent. Examples were jobs created on construction projects that had not started; a business that counted all employees twice because they were given two forms; the company that had counted the 280 students assisted, although no jobs were created; the Colorado company that claimed 4,231 jobs when 3,000 were paid for 5 weeks or less; the preschool that took the 1.84% pay increase on all employees as 1.84 times the number of employees instead of .0184 times the number of employees, overstating "saved" as 785 instead of 8 (amount used for raises).

And writing of raises, does anyone believe that a job was "saved" because of a raise? With this economy, if anyone is foolish enough to quit because they didn't receive a raise, the employer will have 50 applicants wanting the job at an even lower cost.

The California State University system claimed to have saved over 50% of its work force. Anyone believe they really were going to fire 50% of the work force? Anyone believe 50% of the work force in the cushy academia environment would quit in this economy to look for another job? I have a great deal on LV real estate if you believe either of those senarios.

Over 2 weeks after these "errors" (intentional misstatements) were disclosed, not a change on Recovery.Gov. Should we be surprised?

I applaud the effort with recovery.gov, but the job numbers will never be believable, even if these errors are small and random in nature. You've got to get this right the first time to ensure credibility, and this administration blew it. It doesn't help that they have the "saved" qualifier on there, because unless Biden has a crystal ball, you can't determine when a job's been "saved".